Madelyn Payne Dunham opened doors for women at Bank of Hawaii with a firm hand and no fanfare, the same way she helped raise her grandson, Barack Obama.

Dunham, 86, died last night after a battle with cancer, according to a statement from Obama and his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.

Petite and determined, Dunham rose from clerk to bank vice president in the space of a decade, one of two women to reach that position at Bankoh in 1970, the first ever. Dunham remained reserved then, just as she was decades later when the world’s spotlight shone on her grandson.

“She’s a very down-to-earth person, a tiny little woman,” said Alice Dewey, a University of Hawaii professor emeritus and family friend. “No nonsense.”

During Obama’s historic campaign for the U.S. presidency, Dunham steadfastly declined media interviews. Ill and frail, she stayed cloistered in the two-bedroom Punahou-area apartment where she and her late husband Stanley had helped raise “Barry.”

Obama brought his family to Hawaii to visit her in August and paid tribute to her when he accepted his party’s nomination later that month.

“She’s the one who taught me about hard work,” he said. “She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me.”

Just 11 days before the election, Obama suspended his campaign to fly to Honolulu again and spend time with Dunham after she broke her hip and her health failed. He said Dunham, who turned 86 on Oct. 26, was alert but might not live until Election Day.

Dunham had appeared briefly in one campaign commercial, her spine hunched with osteoporosis, saying she believed her grandson had “a lot of depth and a broadness of view.”

In what appears to be her last public interview, in 2004, Dunham told the Chicago Sun-Times that she was “a little amazed” by Obama’s keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, the speech that first catapulted him into the nation’s consciousness. With her grandson, however, she was more circumspect.

“She called up, and she said, ‘You did well,’” Obama recounted the day after that speech. “And I said, ‘Thank you.’ And she said, ‘I just kind of worry about you. I hope you keep your head on straight.’”

Keeping your head on straight, working hard and working wise, treating your neighbor as yourself, those were watchwords for Madelyn Payne Dunham. Obama, who called her “Toot,” short for the Hawaiian word “Tutu,” credits her with passing on those values she grew up with in small-town Kansas. Like many grandparents in Hawaii, she and her husband played a big role in his life.

Their daughter, Stanley Ann Dunham, met and married Barack Obama Sr., the first African student at the University of Hawaii, in 1961 while she was still a freshman there. When he left them two years later, the Dunhams stepped in to help raise little “Barry,” so his mother could go back to college and get her degree in anthropology.

They also looked after Barry during his fifth-grade year and again in high school, allowing him to attend the prestigious Punahou School with help from scholarships. His mother spent those years in Indonesia, her second husband’s homeland and the site of her field work as an anthropologist.

“The support she [Madelyn] provided for Stanley and her little boy was quite phenomenal,” said Marilyn O’Neill, a high school classmate of Stanley Ann’s. “Education was paramount for them.”

Madelyn and Stanley Dunham maintained a simple lifestyle, enjoying family meals together and games of bridge with friends, eschewing the trappings that might come with a bank vice presidency. They were “not interested in rank or power or privilege,” said Georgia McCauley, a close family friend who became “hanai mother” to Obama’s younger sister Maya after their mother died in 1995 at age 52.

“Her grandmother’s lived in the same two-bedroom apartment for 40 years,” McCauley said. “They never drove fancy cars. They chose to put their resources into education and travel.”

Madelyn Payne was born in Peru, Kansas, on Oct. 26, 1922, and her family moved to the nearby oil town of Augusta when she was 3. Just before graduating from high school in 1940, she secretly married Stanley Dunham. During World War II, her husband joined the army and she worked on a bomber assembly line for Boeing.

In 1942, Stanley Ann was born, named after her dad because he had wanted a boy. After the war, the young family traipsed across the country in search of opportunity.

“Her mother was more of the strong, silent type,” recalled Maxine Box, Stanley Ann’s best friend at Mercer Island High School, near Seattle. “And her dad was very gregarious, teasing and smiling and very outgoing. He made a good salesman. She was a banker. It suited her.”

In 1960, the Dunhams moved to Honolulu, where Stanley Dunham continued to work in furniture sales and Madelyn Dunham joined Bankoh. She founded the Escrow Association of Hawaii, said Dennis Ching, now president of Integrity Escrow & Title, and a management trainee under Dunham at Bankoh in 1966.

“She was my first boss,” Ching recalled. “We were afraid of her because she was so gruff. But she was a very warm person after you got to know her and you proved that you could do the job.”

Dunham retired Dec. 31, 1985. Her husband died in 1992 and is buried at Punchbowl Cemetery. For many years, she volunteered at the public library and the courthouse. Even as a volunteer, Dunham had an air of authority, her silver hair in a bun, always properly dressed.

“I used to be in awe of her, half intimidated and half in awe,” said Naomi Komenaka, who supervised a program at the state Judiciary where Dunham volunteered as an arbitrator. “She was feisty and sharp, really sharp. I felt like I had to be two steps ahead of her, and it was challenging to be two steps ahead of her because she was so quick … I really learned a lot from her.”